Streaming Is Easy, Until It’s Not

When it comes to electronics, it's easy to look at advertised features and believe that tech will provide everything you need. But no matter how powerful and integrated it is—perhaps even because of how integrated and powerful it is—you need professionals to run it to ensure you look your best. Streaming may seem easy, but as with any business role, only expertise will make it look easy, even when it's not.

The Lure of New Gear

As the march of new tech accelerates, it begs the question: Do we wait a bit to see what new gear can offer, or do we go with what's available now, even if might seem a bit older

Why You Should Embrace Sustainability (But Not For The Reason You May Think)

To really make an impact, we have to put sustainability within a context we can understand. It's hard, whether as individuals or businesses, sometimes to grasp the very huge concept of climate change and then commit to "sustainability efforts" as a way to have an impact. But when there is context, sustainability efforts can be achieved without actually trying to focus on them in particular. Within the streaming industry, that context is power.

Is 2024 the Year of WebRTC?

With large sports-streaming operators, WebRTC provides a real opportunity for ultra-low-latency streaming. But those same operators, which spend billions on licensing rights, can't afford to just swap the ability to stream content in real time for basic OTT functionality like SSAI and DRM.

All-in-One Streaming Tools Let You Do It All—But Should You?

Today, we are seeing a similar conglomeration of features and abilities in today's production hardware, enabling one person to "do it all!" This begs the question: Should you do it all?

For Live Streaming Producers, Tables of Gear Are Still a Good Idea

While the All-In-One live production and streaming tools grow and mature, let's make sure we keep backup solutions in mind to ensure a successful production—even if it still means a table full of gear.

8 Lessons Surfing Can Teach Live Streaming Producers

I had the opportunity to try and learn to surf earlier this year. I'm very glad that I took the lessons because I soon found out how hard surfing really is. While trying, failing, getting hurt, watching, and learning, I saw some parallels between my lessons on the water and the streaming business—which isn't quite as easy as it looks either.

I’ve Seen The Future of The Streaming Video Tech Stack

The evolution of the evolution of TV is coming soon, hinted at by services like Norsk. I for one can't wait.

Why Aren’t You Streaming Your Live Event?

These days, the cost and technological barriers to live streaming are few are far between. Robert Reinhardt outlines some reasons why organizations may still hesitate to live stream their events, and he shows why these reasons are misguided. He breaks down the ways that even events with small budgets can still produce high-quality live streams.

What Else Did We Get Wrong?

Based on what I'm hearing from a wide array of streaming producers, the heightened demand for streaming live events that we expected to be a natural outcome of its COVID-era ascendancy is either evaporating or simply hasn't materialized.

5 Ways to Future-Proof Your Streaming Role with AI on the Rise

How do you keep your skills relevant and useful regardless of developments in AI, Machine Learning (ML), or more advanced automation in any process related to your role in streaming media? Whether you are a seasoned veteran or just starting out with your career, I recommend setting five goals for the coming year.

Cloud-Based Streaming Production and the Sound of Inevitability

The production and communication tools we use are ever-more tied to the cloud, and to take advantage of it is to open a door of possibility and additional capability. Where do you want to go today?

From Remote to On-Prem Events: The Pendulum Swings

The pendulum has swung back away from streaming for a brief period, but COVID opened millions of eyes to the power, capability, and convenience of streaming—for the providers and the attendees. It also helped a lot of people realize that it's not as easy as it looks. I see the end result moving that pendulum toward more streaming—and more kinds of streaming—in the near future

What's the Point of Streaming?

You might think it's crazy of me, as the executive director of the world's largest streaming technical association, to ask the question in this column's title. But I think it's actually important that we do a gut check every once in a while.

Do Our Technology Advances Slow Down Justice?

Far from content being scarce, the integration of streaming into professional- and citizen-based news-gathering has generated such a monumental level of potential war-crime footage that every day sees an additional 10-100 documented cases of crimes against humanity. And this increased footage brings with it both greater accountability and a significantly higher backlog of cases that need to be tried.

Everybody’s Streaming

While you were busy streaming, what you think of as "streaming" evolved in­to many different things. Today, what you do when "streaming" is but one small piece of the streaming world.

Gear for the HyFlex Teaching and Learning Space

The name of the game for designing a hybrid classroom or meeting space is balancing inclusivity of the remote and on-premise audiences that a colleague sometimes refers to as the "zoomers" and "roomers," respectively. Here's a look at some gear that can help you achieve that balance.

Help Others Stream

Those of us in the industry sometimes lose sight of the fact that billions of people around the world have never used the internet, much less connected on Zoom or watched The Mandalorian in 4K. Here's one way you can help streaming video reach those who don't have good connectivity.

Online Video Learning: Just as Good as In Person?

There's been a lot written about online educational video since the beginning of the pandemic, and the results are surprising, though far from conclusive.

Collecting 'Junk' for Better Streaming

Got junk? The Help Me Stream Research Foundation can take your tech castoffs and use them to research better streaming practices, repurposing it into efficient and inexpensive solutions that can run on intermittent power—dovetailing with the efforts of another new organization, Greening of Streaming.